R. D. Laing Quotes

Quotes about:

• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Learning, Men

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  60 Copy quote

• Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

  R. D. Laing

  Depression, Crazy, Insane World

  98 Copy quote

• Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

  R. D. Laing

  Lying, Deceiving, Capacity

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  43 Copy quote

• A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Taken, Mad

  "The Politics of Experience". Book by Ronald David Laing, p. 58, 1967.

  70 Copy quote

• Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, Mind, Faults

  55 Copy quote

• They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

  R. D. Laing

  Games, Play, Break

  RD Laing (2012). “Selected Works of RD Laing: Knots”, p.5, Routledge

  19 Copy quote

• If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.

  R. D. Laing

  Spring, Passion, Company You Keep

  68 Copy quote

• We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.

  R. D. Laing

  Love, Sentimental, Realizing

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  55 Copy quote

• The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

  R. D. Laing

  Change, Learning, Knowledge

  Attributed in: "Educating Christians" by Jack Lee Seymour, Margaret Ann Crain, Joseph V. Crockett, (p. 53), 1993.

  31 Copy quote

• Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

  R. D. Laing

  Pain, Life Is, This Life

  54 Copy quote

• If I do not know that I do not know, I think I know.
  If I do not know that I know, I think I do not know.

  R. D. Laing

  Thinking, Knows, Ifs

  RD Laing (2012). “Selected Works of RD Laing: Knots”, p.35, Routledge

  6 Copy quote

• What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience...It is radically estranged from the structure of being.

  R. D. Laing

  Depression, Denial, Normal

  30 Copy quote

• The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

  R. D. Laing

  Spiritual, Thinking, Shapes

  Attributed in: "Educating Christians" by Jack Lee Seymour, Margaret Ann Crain, Joseph V. Crockett, (p. 53), 1993.

  24 Copy quote

• Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

  R. D. Laing

  Funny, Life, Sexually Transmitted Diseases

  60 Copy quote

• True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, Self, Ego

  44 Copy quote

• Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

  R. D. Laing

  Life, Success, Sexually Transmitted Diseases

  28 Copy quote

• Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.

  R. D. Laing

  Enlightenment, Psychological, Breakthrough

  21 Copy quote

• Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.

  R. D. Laing

  Insanity, Independence, Negative

  37 Copy quote

• We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

  R. D. Laing

  Civilization, Driven, Destruction

  34 Copy quote

• There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.

  R. D. Laing

  Reason, Obedient

  3 Copy quote

• Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, War, Dirty

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  8 Copy quote

• From the moment of birth, when the Stone-Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence called love, as its father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.

  R. D. Laing

  Love, Mother, Baby

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  6 Copy quote

• Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

  R. D. Laing

  Love, Life, Psychology

  44 Copy quote

• No one has the answer: we are answer and question.

  R. D. Laing

  Answers

  23 Copy quote

• Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.

  R. D. Laing

  Betrayal, Abdication, Normal

  43 Copy quote

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